Fungi: mycelia, mushrooms & more

A long time ago, not so far away, freshwater plants partnered with fungi and moved onto land from lake and river shores.

Liverworts are the closest living analogs to the first plants that arrived on land, almost half a billion years ago.

Like other leafy liverworts, Hooker’s flapwort grows as a network of underground axes, or stem-like structures, that put out small, photosynthesizing shoots above the soil. Looking at these subterranean stems using an electron microscope, Duckett noticed a symbiotic fungus that he described as an “odd fungus that looked like nothing anyone had seen before.”

Duckett was curious about the fungus, so he teamed up with Martin Bidartondo, a molecular ecologist working at Kew Gardens. Initially Bidartondo was at a loss, reporting back that he couldn’t identify the fungus’s DNA. Eventually, using new techniques, he found that the mystery symbiont belonged to the Mucoromycotina, or “mucs,” an ancient lineage of fungi previously known only as free-living decomposers.

These discoveries have prompted many new questions about plant evolution that researchers have yet to answer. How do plants, gloms, and mucs work together to balance each partners’ nutritional needs? (...)